The Oakham Curry Club (OCC) is one of the worlds most respected reviewers of Indian cuisine. With multiple international franchises, we relentlessly scour the globe in pursuit of the crispiest poppadoms, the tastiest sauces and spiciest curries.

A little too much BS, but OCC approved

The Oakham Curry Club (OCC) is a well-respected Institution with multiple international franchises.

The OCC takes pride in searching out the finest Indian restaurants and providing impartial reviews of Curry Houses all over the world.

Members vote anonymously without being influenced by other members (we call this “no swaying”) on 5 categories, and an average score out of a maximum 10 is given to each restaurant we review.

On Friday 13th July 2018 - during the World Cup - 6 members of the OCC visited Black Salt (BS) and upon arrival we discovered we had 1. the entire terrace for ourselves and 2. Free flow beers all night. This was never going to be a bad meet, was it...?

And of course it wasn’t. It was one of the best.

For full transparency see below scores. The voting is based on the votes from OCC members who have been through a rigorous selection process to gain entry into the Club. In short, we all know our curries.

Quality: 8.7
Value: 6.7 (the bill landed at HKD870 per head however did include a free flow package but was still punchy)
Service: 7.7
Customer care: 7.8
Atmosphere: 7.8

Overall: 7.73

The World Cup banter during the meet was as free flow as the beers and by the time the okra fries and datshi chilli cheese fondue were served for starters we knew we were in for a good meet. It seemed to definitely “be hearty food with deep blends of Southeast Asian and European flavours and made for sharing” and although the elaborate website said “you can watch the action of the open kitchen”, all the action was happening on the terrace where the OCC were on fire (and many arseholes were petrified).

Yours truly - proudly the official blog writer of the OCC HK Branch I’ll have you know - had frequented this establishment on 2 previous occasions but had not swayed (pun intended) away from the signature dishes and so I was delighted to get to try the fish cakes which were tremendous. I even (think I) can remember sneakily taking an extra fishcake as the two Danes in the group were passionately discussing the exciting 0-0 draw with France as the Englishmen were chanting “its coming home” wearing dodgy waistcoats and so we’re not keeping an eye on the hand-cut fishy merch.

Yours truly was also starting to marginally change his view on the manager, who had, on a previous occasion, been flirting with me about embracing my new website and app platform dedicated to food but then subsequently decided to not reply to my mails when I offered his restaurant a free photoshoot of his menu (yep...no brainer, right?!) and had instead decided to spend days writing more copy for his website. In the end he served us well but maybe he should spend more time searching his inbox than searching the thesaurus for more adjectives to describe a curry house.

The famous meatball dumplings were up next and we were delighted the smart, innovative chef had not even thought twice about delivering us vegetarian or salmon dumplings and served us up the signature pork and chicken dumplings . Natch. He knows his meatballs and he knows the OCC. I mean ...so he should.

This was most definitely shaping up to be a “modern twist of the Indian subcontinent” and we were excited to see what was next. More beers. Amazing. And this time the manager realised it would be better to bring us jugs of beers rather than individual pints. And as quickly as you can say “using only the freshest premium ingredients and seasoned with home-made masala spices, BlackSalt's dishes are inspired mostly by Nepalese, Bengali and Sri Lankan cuisine”, there was another tick in the box for customer care. Well done son. Take a bow.

The mains arrived and they were as good as the rest. Great sauce, good quality meat, nice flavour, but just not spicy enough and a little too pretentious to be frank for the men of the OCC.

As one member rightly put it - after about 10 beers - “it’s great...but it’s not a f...ing curry is it”